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DAME Beryl Bainbridge, one of the finest, most prolific and most loved British novelists of the 20th century, has died of cancer, aged 75. Beryl was born in Liverpool and brought up in Formby. It was a tense, uneasy childhood, of family rows and slammed doors; Beryl evoked it movingly in A Quiet Life (1976). She left school early and never went to university, a fact that she often brought up in interviews. Her first career was acting; her years at the Liverpool Playhouse became the background for one of her Booker-nominated works, An Awfully Big Adventure, later filmed with Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. She appeared in Coronation Street in 1961, playing an anti-nuclear protester. As parts dried up, she began writing to pass the time, using her edgy childhood memories as raw material. After several rejections, she was signed by Duckworth in 1972. When her fifth novel, The Bottle Factory Outing, won the Guardian Fiction Prize and narrowly missed the Booker, she was lionised by literary metropolitans. In the early 1990s, her
books changed in subject and style. She began taking her subjects from
history: the maiden voyage of the Titanic in Every Man for Himself,
the latter days of Dr Johnson in According to Queenie.
"Had I not written my books I would probably have been in a
mental home by now," she told an interviewer in 2004. —
By arrangement with The Independent
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